Spider World - The Delta

There are post-apocalyptic futures in which humanity falls to nuclear war, plague, climate collapse or its own magnificent talent for making terrible decisions. Colin Wilson, with admirable economy, asks: what if the problem was spiders? Not the little domestic sort in the bath, doing their best with leggy embarrassment. Proper spiders. Civilisation-ending spiders. Spiders large enough to make mankind reconsider its attitude to ceilings.

Spider World: The Delta continues Wilson’s grand, unsettling exercise in evolutionary humiliation, in which humanity is no longer the proud master of the planet but a nervous, edible minority living under the shadow of its many-legged superiors. The old human world has been swept aside, and in its place is a society where survival means cunning, secrecy, endurance and the constant awareness that nature has not merely reclaimed the earth but fitted it with mandibles.

The title has that pleasingly blunt science-fiction quality: The Delta. It sounds geographical, biological, symbolic and faintly damp, which is about right. A delta is where rivers split and spread, where land becomes uncertain, where routes multiply and danger can approach from almost any direction, possibly while making no sound at all. In Wilson’s hands, it becomes another stage in the struggle of humans trying to move through a world that has stopped being arranged for their convenience. This is the future as an obstacle course designed by something with too many legs and no respect for property law.

Wilson’s great interest, as ever, is not simply monsters. Any fool can make a spider bigger, though one would prefer they didn’t. What matters here is the pressure the new order places on human consciousness. Fear changes people. Subjection changes people. Living as prey changes people. The old arrogance of mankind has to be rebuilt into something smaller, sharper and perhaps more intelligent. If you are no longer top species, philosophy suddenly becomes less of a dinner-table luxury and more of a survival mechanism.

There is a wonderfully horrible irony in the whole arrangement. Human beings spent centuries congratulating themselves on progress, reason, technology and dominion over nature, only to find themselves reduced to furtive mammals trying not to attract attention. The spiders do not care about human exceptionalism. They do not pause to admire Shakespeare, parliamentary democracy or the electric kettle. They are the sort of ruling class that skips ideology and goes straight to wrapping things.

This is adventure SF with a distinctly Wilsonian underside: pulpy enough to enjoy as a tale of danger and escape, odd enough to make you suspect the spiders are also an argument about power, instinct, evolution and the ridiculous fragility of human self-importance. It has that late-1980s paperback confidence that a book can be both slightly mad and completely serious about its own internal nightmare.

This Grafton copy is in Good condition, meaning it has survived the ordinary hazards of paperback life and has not, despite the obvious risk, been webbed into a corner and drained of its contents. Crappy Old Books offers it for readers of post-apocalyptic SF, creature-haunted futures, Colin Wilson completists, and anyone who has ever looked at a spider in the sink and thought, “Small now, yes, but I don’t entirely trust the long-term trend.”

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